Posts Tagged ‘Show Me Love’

This was the year I realized that my annual goal of seeing pretty much every movie released in a given year was more impossible than ever. The reason for this is the exponential growth in the number of films now being released in the digital age. When I started doing these lists back in 2001, there were about 300 official releases per year; now it’s closer to 700. With that in mind, I’d like to start with a partial list of movies I meant to see in 2014, but just didn’t get to in time. Then, to acknowledge the relatively arbitrary nature of these lists in general, I’m listing my Top 10 in categories by which each film corresponds to another one from my Top 20 (only the Top 10 is ranked in order of preference). It’ll make more sense as you read it, I promise.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (40 movies I didn’t see in time for this list, in alphabetical order): Bird People; The Boxtrolls; Calvary; Chef; Citizenfour; Coherence; The Congress; Enemy; Fading Gigolo; Filth; Force Majeure; Foxcatcher; Frank; Fury; Gloria; Happy Christmas; Ida; Joe; A Letter to Momo; Leviathan; Life After Beth; Like Father, Like Son; Lucy; Men, Women & Children; A Million Ways to Die in the West; Mr. Turner; Moebius; A Most Violent Year; Night Moves; Palo Alto; The Rocket; The Sacrament; St. Vincent; Song of the Sea; Starred Up; Stonehearst Asylum; Top Five; 22 Jump Street; Virunga; Wrinkles.

This gentle, insightful and wonderfully realistic comedy-drama from Sweden gets my vote for best film you’ve probably never heard of. We here at Movies I Didn’t Get feel it is our responsibility to not only debate the merits of popular and overrated films that we didn’t get, but also to champion those that we did get, and which we feel are underrated, or in this case, simply not well enough known (we also like to just review movies, as you can see by scrolling through our archives). At any rate, amidst a constant stream of banal, exploitative and unconvincing teen movies, Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love stands out as a testament to the truth of living through that difficult age between twelve and nineteen, especially when one is perceived to be â€œdifferentâ€ for whatever reason. As the great Roger Ebert said of this beautiful, understated masterpiece, â€œthis film loves teenagers; most teen movies just use them.â€ I rarely quote another critic, but this is so astute, I couldn’t resist.

Moodysson’s most well-known film is Lilya 4-Ever (2002), a harrowing tale of teen prostitution in Eastern Europe and the conditions that can lead to it, there or elsewhere. The first time I saw Show Me Love, I was not aware it was made by the same director and I had not yet seen any of his other films, which also include Together (2000) and A Hole in My Heart (2004), the latter of which is even more disturbing than Lilya. However, even without prior knowledge of Moodysson’s always excellent work, there is a sense of impending doom throughout his first feature, a feeling that something terrible might happen at any moment; this is, in many ways, a perfect representation of what it is like to be a teenager in modern times.Â Read More